PFI-TT: Creating Commercial-grade Hardware Design Tools for Automated Design of Application-specific Embedded Systems

此创新伙伴关系(PFI)项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是能够以最少的工程工作自动创建高度优化的特定于应用的系统。这一能力将在物联网、医疗技术、可穿戴设备和印刷电子等几个不断增长和新兴的行业领域发挥推动作用。对于驱动这些应用的低功耗系统，能效是决定尺寸、重量、成本、可靠性和寿命等关键特性的主要因素。同样，安全对这些系统至关重要，因为它们收集和处理涵盖日常生活许多方面的数据，从而暴露出信息安全攻击的巨大攻击面。该项目开发的安全和能效自动化解决方案可能会对物联网领域产生颠覆性影响，预计到2020年，物联网领域的市场规模将达到4570亿美元。在该项目中开发的工具可以显著减少特定应用系统的设计时间和成本，实现更广泛的部署，并为DIY打印处理器等全新市场提供牵引力。此外，这些工具可以提高广大民众的信息安全，并允许更广泛地部署集成到大量日常活动中的智能系统。拟议的项目将创建商业级电子设计自动化工具，这些工具可以自动为特定目标应用程序创建特定于应用程序的硬件设计。这些工具将有能力优化设计以实现极高的能源效率，并执行安全分析，以确保系统的安全，实现一系列所需的安全特性。该项目的主要工作包括根据行业定义的需求和要求将研究工具转换为商业级工具。将研究工具转变为可无缝集成到行业设计流程中的工具需要进行增强，以允许工具支持任意硬件设计和系统组件。这些工具还必须进行优化，以实现对工业中使用的更大硬件设计和更复杂应用程序的可扩展分析。为了证明商业可行性，开发的工具将在工业设计和应用程序上进行评估，并且必须证明能够快速、高效和自动地创建高度优化的特定于应用程序的硬件设计，而只需很少的工程工作。能够实现这些目标的工具将在许多需要超低功耗特定应用系统的行业中具有强大的商业潜力，例如物联网、医疗技术和印刷电子产品。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) project is the ability to automatically create highly-optimized application-specific systems with minimal engineering effort. This ability will be an enabler in several growing and emerging industry sectors, such as IoT, med-tech, wearables, and printed electronics. For the low-power systems that drive these applications, energy efficiency is the primary factor that determines critical characteristics such as size, weight, cost, reliability, and lifetime. Likewise, security is critical for these systems, as they collect and handle data encompassing many aspects of daily life and thus expose a huge attack surface for information security attacks. Automated solutions for security and energy efficiency developed in this project can potentially make a disruptive impact on the IoT space, which is predicted to have a market size of $457 billion by 2020. Tools developed in this project can significantly reduce design time and cost for application-specific systems, enabling wider deployment and providing traction for entirely new markets such as DIY printed processors. Additionally, these tools can improve information security for the population at large and allow broader deployment of intelligent systems integrated into a large number of daily activities. The proposed project will create commercial-grade electronic design automation tools that can automatically create an application-specific hardware design for a specific target application. These tools will have the capability to optimize designs for extreme energy efficiency and to perform security analysis that can guarantee the security of a system for a set of desired security properties. The primary work of this project involves translating research tools into commercial-grade tools, based on industry-defined needs and requirements. Transforming the research tools into tools that can be seamlessly integrated into industry design flows requires enhancements to allow the tools to support arbitrary hardware designs and system components. The tools must also be optimized to enable scalable analysis of larger hardware designs and more complex applications used in industry. To demonstrate commercial viability, the developed tools will be evaluated on industry designs and applications and must demonstrate the ability to create highly-optimized application-specific hardware designs quickly, efficiently, and automatically with little engineering effort. Tools that can meet these objectives will have strong commercial potential in a number of industries that require ultra-low-power application-specific systems, such as IoT, med-tech, and printed electronics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.